Berlin (dpa) – It should be the year of the biggest ever football championship with twelve hosts. The year of an Olympic festival of records shortly afterwards in Tokyo.
Athletes on the hunt for titles and medals and millions of spectators in the stadiums, on the tracks, in the halls. The 2020 sports calendar promised highlights at the beginning of the year with almost no respite. Formula 1 wanted to travel the world on a record course over 22 stations, and ice and snow sports enthusiasts wanted to gain momentum for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
It turned out differently, very differently. 2020 was also a practical test of unimaginable proportions for sport, in Germany and worldwide, at the top and in breadth. The corona crisis has partly led sport to its limits of existence – long-term damage as well as infections with the Sars-CoV-2 virus are not foreseeable.
The complaints about the expected heat at the Tokyo games look almost ridiculous in retrospect. Discussions about the tension in the Bundesliga, in which Bayern were allowed to raise the championship trophy after Hansi Flick took office, also. The fact that Munich had to celebrate in front of empty ranks after a week-long lockdown and the season did not end until the end of June was also evidence of the exceptional situation in 2020.
After the infection rate from Wuhan in China accelerated worldwide in February and turned into a pandemic, it gradually hit sport as well. The Bundesliga had to take a two-month break from mid-March. The Champions and the Europa League were played to the end in August in final tournaments.
In the European master class, FC Bayern triumphed after having won the league and the DFB Cup. The former national coaching assistant Flick had formed the Munich team into a successful team after his promotion to head coach in a crash course, to the clearers of the summer. Bayern also secured the German and European Supercup.
Sporting success was one thing, hygiene and safety concepts were another. The Bundesliga showed it to all top leagues, played without spectators. Formula 1 also got off to a flying start, also in front of a ghostly backdrop and around four months late. The most important fuel here as there was money. Games for TV, races for TV – money for the actors.
It was worse for others. There was a slightly different ice age in German ice hockey: nothing went in the DEL for almost 300 days, not even a champion was crowned in the spring. Handball and basketball also found that their business models, which are hugely dependent on audience revenue, are not crisis-proof.
A new humility was promptly proclaimed in football. “We will definitely take a lot with us from this situation and think about what the future economic, but perhaps also the value foundation of the Bundesliga can look like,” said league manager Christian Seifert, who gained stature as a crisis manager.
Whether the call for a moral reorganization is sustainable or will soon be forgotten in the hunt through the overcrowded appointment calendar – it remains to be seen. When the top of the DFL presented the new key to distributing the TV billions at the beginning of December, many fans were disappointed with the lack of willingness to take a radical cure.
In the motorsport premier class, the Nürburgring even celebrated a comeback in the year of emergency, otherwise everything stayed the same: Mercedes and superstar Lewis Hamilton cleared away. With the seventh driver title, the 35-year-old Brit caught up with record world champion Michael Schumacher, he has long since had more pole positions and more victories.
For others, it was all about perseverance. Olympia in Tokyo – postponed for one year. The IOC with the German President Thomas Bach and the Japanese organizers saw themselves forced to act after long hesitation. Sports, which often only receive increased attention every four years, have almost stopped. Motivation problems, but also worries about existence instead of glamor and glory. Athletes have been preparing for years – for nothing. Hardly anything else took place either.
Amateur and popular sports groaned under lockdown and partial lockdown. Closed halls, declining membership numbers, tired volunteer work. “There is a real danger that we will find sports Germany significantly weakened in its structure,” reported the President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, Alfons Hörmann. The 60-year-old emphasized: “We are part of the solution and not the problem.” Corona hit the world of sports, from small clubs to large companies, hard in 2020 and sometimes paralyzed it.
The sports year had already started with a shock. In January, a helicopter crash tore the American basketball icon Kobe Bryant from the life at the age of 41. His 13-year-old daughter died with him. In November the football world mourned Argentina when the legend Diego Armando Maradona died of cardiac arrest at the age of only 60. «God is dead», headlined the French magazine «L’Equipe».
In a year of sadness, the German national team could not provide anything like a collective feeling of happiness. But on the contrary. Director Oliver Bierhoff identified “dark clouds”. Interest in the DFB selection has waned, the criticism has become more intense, and the focus is on national coach Joachim Löw. The bad weather front became even more violent after the historic 0: 6 in the Nations League in November in Spain. But despite severe upheavals with the hitherto hapless DFB Cef Fritz Keller, Löw once again got the trust from the association for the EM, which will now take place next summer.
2020 – a year for many to forget. But the aftermath will continue. Cheering spectators in full arenas, fear-free emotions without a mask and corona endurance tests – the return to normal sports is open. The next sports year is likely to be deeply shaped by the consequences of the pandemic, even if the leagues and associations want to catch up on a lot of what was canceled this year. Everyone should be able to agree on what Bayern’s Thomas Müller said to the ghost scenes after the Bundesliga final: “You don’t want to get used to it.”
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